Why So Serious?
On May 5, I will run the Pittsburgh Marathon. I do this not because I am a good runner; quite the opposite in fact. To paraphrase Buffalo Bill, I’m a big fat guy: 6’3” and 240ish pounds. I run slowly and haltingly. I swear and curse while I’m out there. I sweat enough to thoroughly occupy a bucket brigade. The entirety of my goal that day is finishing the race in fewer than five hours*.
I come to running late in life, having made half-hearted attempts in college (Shin Splint City!) and again a few years after graduating (Wheeze Cough City!) and then, finally, a little more than a year and a half ago when I couldn’t get a basketball game at my usual gym. I ran three miles instead. And then I kept running. I’ve since run some races, finishing 5ks and 5-milers and 10ks and half-marathons. The longest I’ve ever gone is 16 miles.
I’ve also started a running club: the Morgantown Bad Runners Club. We run once or twice a week and our guiding principles are being both supportive of one another (“High-fives at the end everybody!” and self-deprecating about our performance. That last part is important to me because within the running community, there are the serious runners, people for whom running is much more than a form of exercise, people for whom running is religion.
And you’ve met religious people, right? They’re not always the most laid back about the things they believe. Serious Runners work the same way. For a primer on the sort of attitude that I’m talking about, enjoy this bit of outright dickheadedness from Men’s Health magazine.
So again: I get it. I get having a thing. I get having a passion. But I balk at the seriousness with which people engage in these activities or at least the mythology surrounding these activities. And before going farther, I want to acknowledge that these same people exist in everything everywhere, whether it is the guy ready to fight at pickup basketball game (“Foul me one MORE time bro!”) or the mom freaking out about breast-feeding (“So you want your kids to be developmentally broken because you don’t feel like loving your child enough?”). I get the screaming heebie-jeebies from all of them. Do your thing, in other words, but calm the f-ck down about it.
One of the side-effects of serious engagement with a thing – running, in this case – is losing all manner of perspective about what it is that is being done. It’s just running. It’s not curing cancer. It’s not saving the world. But that doesn’t stop runners and running organizations from believing that one is like the other.
For instance, would you ever read the following quote from Martin Luther King…
…and think to yourself, “He means the start of marathon training!” You wouldn’t? That’s weird. I mean, I wouldn’t either, but that didn’t stop the Pittsburgh Marathon from being fully convinced that King’s comment was not only meant generally, but meant so broadly as to apply to people voluntarily being ridiculous enough to run 26.2 miles. I responded to that idea of course. The race’s social media director held his/her ground.
Because civil rights and marathons are the same thing. Because they’re equals. Because there’s no difference between blacks functionally being lesser citizens and people running for a long time in tiny shorts. No difference at all.
Maybe that’s not what they were saying though. Maybe it was that they liked the way that Dr. King put the words together. Maybe they saw the combination of words and thought, “That’s a concept applicable to so many things, including running!” Maybe they thought that they were paying tribute to the man by taking his message on the day set aside for his remembrance and re-purposing them as motivational encouragement for the race’s runners.
That seems like a hugely charitable reading of the situation, but perhaps it is worthwhile as a stanch against my own frustration with just how seriously some insist upon taking this activity, seriousness which seems to exclude taking long enough to realize that quotes about social injustice are not necessarily also acceptable as motivational tools. But just to make sure of that, I thought I’d try plugging in other King quotes:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character and their ability to run a marathon.”
Nope.
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity and wearing inappropriately fitted running shoes for a marathon.”
Unacceptable.
“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable so train hard for your marathon. … Every step toward the goal of justice finishing a marathon requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals will be rewarded by finishing a marathon.”
Inappropriate.
Obviously, the above isn’t exactly what the Marathon did, but it is a more literal example of what the race’s social media director was trying to do. And it’s absurd.
*The best runners in the world finish these things in just more than hours.
My first marathon was when I was 37 and I had just finished losing 75 pounds. It was 4:20 and some change.
Waddle on my friend, waddle on.Report
Everyday I’m hobbling.Report
Nice. This is quite funny to me. When I was younger I was a serious worker-outer. Running, cycling, lifting. As many as twelve workouts a week. At my peak, I was doing log house construction or (running a chain saw for 8-10 hours a day) or raft guiding (which is actually pretty mellow) and running/cycling both before and after the work day most days. I read the training/fitness mags about how to increase my VO2 max and anaerobic threshold and all that. I had heartrate monitors and scheduled low heart rate recovery work outs (at 155!) into my routine and tried really hard to increase my maximum heart rate. (For a long time it was capped at 172, which was a drag. I remember when I realized that too much consistent high heart rate work can actually lower your maximum heartrate. That was a surprise.) All that.
But I was never one of those people. Of course not.Report
The marathoner I knew had a resting heartrate of about … 40 or so. Also, vegan.Report
I think you can do all of that stuff enthusiastically, so long as you’re not outraged by the idea that somebody else somewhere is doing things slightly different than you are. The last thing I want to do is lump all serious athletes in with this particular group of dour scolds. That’s not the case.Report
Good luck with the marathon. You’re right, it’s just running but it’s a whole lot of running at once.Report
ARGH! You’re going to beat me to a marathon, my friend.
I wish you the very best of luck.
And yeah, it’s just running. A while back I posted about how unseemly I found it that Runner’s World tried to elevate it into some noble tribute to the 9/11 victims in their 10th anniversary issue. It may be my chosen pastime, but a pastime it remains. Nothing more.Report
“Beating” you to a marathon in terms of the calendar, perhaps, but you retain every imaginable time title.
And when did you post about Runner’s World and 9/11? How did I miss that?Report
Behold.Report
Run, Wilkinson, run.
/proudReport
This was space awesome.Report
http://www.rachelcarsontrails.org/rct/challenge
I hear this event has better organizers. It might be that I know some volunteers for it… 😉
The Pittsburgh Marathon seems like a total party thing (music, free food, a bunch of local communities getting a chance to show off). Are they winding it up in Heinz Field this year?Report
I really don’t understand why you think the tips from Mens Health are dickheaded. The tips seem reasonable and courteous. Some are a little silly, such as Upgrade Your Attire, I personally could care less what the next person is wearing. I may not understand since I have ran all of my life, but if I am being a dickhead I would truly like some enlightening on what the bad advice in this article is.Report
The individual bits of advice might be just fine, but they’re kind of laid out in a dickish way. This title isn’t framed in terms of what you should know, or what might be helpful, or what might allow you to enjoy the sport. It’s framing it in terms of what you need to do so that
the cool kids will lower themselves to talking to youthe real runners don’t have to put up with how annoying the newbie is.ReportI must admit, the only one that really struck me as dickheaded was the attire suggestion. (Only a dick would care about such a thing, much less stipulate thusly.) Everything else seemed pretty much simple courtesy to me, too.Report
There are plenty of places we could start but:
1. My biggest objection is the idea that this stuff is somehow secretive knowledge that only serious runners know. Don’t run on the left? Don’t spit on people? Don’t smell bad? That’s common sense, not high holy secrets of the Tarahumara.
2. All of this advice is basically centered around the idea of how we can make running better for those who take it seriously. Since they’re so offended by our attire, we should dress better. Since they’re so offended by our training regimens, we should train differently. Since they’re so offended by my chub rub chafing (why again is that their concern), we should lube up more. It’s all about them and their needs.Report
i didn’t really read it as such and i am a gentleman of both stature and gravity.Report
6’3″ 240 pounds is not fat! It’s healthy, well-built, muscular. A person could even be a couple of inches shorter than that and weigh a few pounds more, and it’d still be rude to call him fat. He wouldn’t be lean, but he’d have nothing to apologize for.
I’m just saying.Report
While I assure you that you don’t want to see me in my cold weather running tights – “GAAAAAH, MY EYES!!! FETCH THE BLEACH!!! – I also appreciate the kind words. I also boggle at the health-and-fitness charts which recommend that a 6’3” man should weigh 180 pounds. At the healthiest I’ve ever been, I weighed 220 pounds. That was with a strict(ish) diet and almost daily exercise. I drop 40 pounds from where I was then sounds impossible.Report
Anecdotes are not data, but…
Look at pictures of ordinary people in the US going back to the Civil War. Soldiers in the war — the majority of whom were recently civilians, and who received minimal physical training — look positively scrawny, but were fit enough to do 20-mile marches with 40-50 pounds of gear for multiple days in a row. Look at city street scenes from the 1920s; nary a paunch to be seen. When I look at old family pictures from the 1950s, I am struck by how skinny the adults look compared to people today.
I have a friend who gets sent to do research for Intel on how people in undeveloped and developing countries use computers — Brazil, India, China, and a variety of places in Africa. He remarks that the first thing he notices when he walks through the US airport upon returning from a week or two in any of those places is how heavy everyone looks. As he puts it, “Even most of the slender people in the US look like they’re overweight.”
I would be willing to take a small bet that, if you were to find yourself in a situation where every day was a continuous mild-level exercise program, but at the end of those eight or ten hours you had seldom sat down, cumulatively walked several miles, and cumulatively lifted and carried a couple tons, and had a modest restriction on the calories available (especially from red meat), you would wind up down in the neighborhood of that 180 pounds. And by contemporary standards, be remarkably fit. Not marathon-fit, or power-lifting fit, but fit in the sense of spending the day helping your friend move, carrying furniture and boxes of china and books up and down stairs and lifting it onto and off of the truck and never breathing particularly hard or being sore the next day. About the only people who can do this these days are actors preparing for a role where they want to look “emaciated” and can afford a stable of people around them to enforce the regimen.Report
I’m completely out of my element, but doesn’t human framing start to matter at some point?Report
I was being facetious. 6’3″ 240# is a range I’m very familiar with, and I certainly have some topographic features I wish I didn’t. It’s been a tough road to get down to the size I am.
I haven’t done any travelling in developing countries, but I have seen the difference in Europe. To put it statistically, I think the mode is similar, but the upper-end variation is much higher in the US. To put it less statistically, you just don’t see a certain body shape in Europe.Report
I’m a little under 6’1″. When I got down to around 180, I looked like a heroin addict.Report
I say yay for Sam!Report
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by their race, but by their race.”Report
Not cool. NOT COOL. I should have thought of this and now I’m mad at you.Report
Nice.Report